May 30 (Bloomberg) -- Roger Easton, one of the lead
inventors of the Global Positioning System, the satellite-based
navigation technology used by everything from mobile phones to
guided missiles, has died. He was 93.

He died May 8 at his home in Hanover, New Hampshire,
according to a statement by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory
in Washington, where he worked for 37 years.

Easton helped create some of the most significant space
systems, including Project Vanguard, which in 1958 launched the
first solar-powered satellite, and the U.S. Naval Space
Surveillance System, which tracked thousands of man-made objects
orbiting Earth through a nationwide network of detectors.

His contributions to the Global Positioning System, or GPS,
grew out of his earlier work and were the source of his greatest
fame. The system today involves two dozen orbiting satellites,
called Navstar, that send out precisely timed signals. The
transmissions are detected by mobile phones, aircraft, cars and
ships at sea to enable accurate navigation.

Originally deployed for the military, GPS has come to
encompass entire industries involving navigation, surveying,
communication and time-keeping. Services related to the
technology generate annual revenue of $150 billion to $270
billion globally, according to a 2013 study by Oxford, U.K.-
based Oxera Consulting Ltd.

At the Navy lab starting in 1964, Easton developed the
Timation system (named for time-navigation) which featured
satellites carrying highly accurate clocks in orbit.

Other Contributors

Easton isn’t the only scientist credited for the
development of GPS. Ivan Getting, a Raytheon Manufacturing Co.
scientist who envisioned a version of GPS in the 1950s, and
Bradford Parkinson, an Air Force colonel who developed it in the
1970s, were both inducted into the National Inventors Hall of
Fame for their contributions to satellite-based navigation.

Easton held 11 U.S. patents including patent 3,789,409 for
“navigation systems using satellites and passive ranging
techniques” for timation, according to the Navy lab statement.

Roger Lee Easton was born on April 30, 1921, in Craftsbury,
Vermont, to Frank Birch Easton, a physician, and Della Donnocker
Easton, a homemaker. He graduated from the Craftsbury Academy in
1939 and Middlebury College in Vermont in 1943. Later that year,
after one semester at the University of Michigan, he joined the
Navy lab.

His initial work was on radar beacons and instrument
landing systems. In the 1950s, at Whites Sands Proving Grounds
in New Mexico, he was involved in rocket experiments, according
to the Navy lab’s statement. He also helped coordinate tracking
of Sputnik after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first
satellite in 1957.

Lab Retirement

In 1980, Easton retired as head of the Space Applications
Branch at the lab.

He moved to Canaan, New Hampshire, and served two terms in
the state legislature. In 1986, he ran in the Republican
gubernatorial primary, focusing on his opposition to the
Seabrook Station nuclear power plant, then under construction.

“The only thing worse than losing would be winning,” he
told his family, according to the statement.

In 2004, President George W. Bush presented him with the
National Medal of Technology. In 2010, he was inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia.

Survivors include his wife of 68 years, the former Barbara
Coulter; a daughter, Ruth Easton; two sons, Roger Easton Jr. and
Richard Easton, and five grandchildren, according to the Navy
lab statement.